Unlocking your phone could be as easy as taking a selfie

Apple Inc. has been granted an official patent on a technology that uses facial recognition to unlock mobile phones.

Published by The U.S. Patent and Trade Office Tuesday, the patent document shows that Apple has been developing this iPhone feature since at least 2011.

Essentially, a user would bring the phone up to his or her face, at which point a sensor would trigger a processor to capture an image. That image would then be analyzed against an image of the user’s face that was presumably taken when he or she set the feature up. If the faces in both photos match, the phone would automatically unlock.

Apple also notes that this technology could be used to identify additional authorized users, much like the biometric fingerprint scanner it unveiled in 2013 with the iPhone 5S.